Tag: Fundamentalism

26Oct

What the World Needs Now…

Where to begin.

I’m sure you all have seen the YouTube videos where the frizzy-haired woman in a McCain t-shirt yammers wildly about how Obama is an ARAB! And a MUSLIM! And a SOCIALIST! And BLACK! And an ANTI-AMERICAN TERRORIST! I have to turn those videos off after about five seconds or I get hives.

Well, it has recently come to my attention that some of my relatives are saying things about Obama that make terrorist rantings sound like compliments. They believe with all their hearts that Barack Obama:
          Is the potential antichrist
          Will incite “riots, terrorism, and chaos”
          Is using “forces of darkness” to become president
          Is being supported by a personal genie
          Plans to overthrow Kenya
          Is hypnotizing voters
          Wants to kill all our babies
          Is a “warlock”
          Utilizes the spirit of a python to “constrict” our finances and health
          Campaigns against McCain and Palin through “chanting, praying to the constellation, theosophy, theomancy, white magic, candle magic, water witching, tribalism, meditation, astral projection, human sacrifices, water spirits, territorial witchcraft, and radical Islamic hatred”

I feel poisoned every time I read their list—an inky black sickness that won’t rub off—and I find myself in the impossible dilemma of wanting to make a stand against hatred while realizing that willful ignorance doesn’t listen. Damn, that sounds preachy. But how do you convince someone that his or her beliefs, no matter how outrageous or unfounded, are wrong? Horribly, hurtfully wrong?

Many Christians I know have aligned themselves with the Republican party without regard to the candidates or the platforms just because Christian = Republican, duh. And they haven’t just aligned themselves; they’ve lashed themselves to the mast with a thick rope and forty-two sailor knots. They approach politics with a religious fervor that easily lends itself to hatred, and rather than look up Obama’s religious background (devoted Christian), they invent one for him (radical Islamic terrorist). They spread nasty rumors and hold prayer meetings to literally curse the Democrats. And they have the audacity to think God is cheering them on.

Last time I checked my Bible, God was love. Not hate. Numerous verses warn against slander, gossip, malice, stirring up dissension, and defaming one’s neighbor, and in his most famous sermon, Jesus told us to bless and not curse. I honestly don’t care if my relatives want to vote for McCain—they have that right, and it in no way indicates they are stupid. But I do strongly care that they not spread outlandish and blatantly un-Christian lies in the name of God about the man I voted to lead our country.

Party politics aside, hatred is never the answer. Never. And I hope that the people I know and love can find the strength of character to rise above ignorance and find the kindness this world so desperately needs.

6Sep

Flames vs. Fairy Dust

In retrospect, I’m not sure whether to laugh or to cry.

I was young, maybe ten, when I saw the drama “Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames” in a huge Southern Baptist auditorium. Gold tinsel was draped over one side of the stage, while the other side featured a black papier-mâché prison with tissue paper flames engulfing the roof. Heaven, hell.

The drama was very simple to follow. People would die during different circumstances and immediately be sent to the tinsel or to the prison. Two women were gossiping when a bus ran them over; a group of demon-thugs in ski masks dragged them straight to hell. A man passed out from drinking too much whiskey; off to hell. A broken-hearted woman cried at the loss of hope in her life and shot herself in the head; hell. A freshly-scrubbed family dressed in lace and bow-ties walked out of church where the youngest daughter had just invited Jesus into her heart—a fortunate coincidence, since their car crashed on the way home. Gold tinsel for the whole family!

When we got home that night, I asked my parents what happened to aborted babies or even little kids who die before they get a chance to say the all-important Sinner’s Prayer™. No answer. Apparently hell-according-to-the-Southern-Baptists did not discriminate based on age. I lay awake half the night imagining tiny mangled infants being dragged off to burn with Satan. That, my friends, is horror.

I’ve done some thinking over the last few years, and some reading… but mostly thinking. Among other things, I’ve been trying to figure out why the self-proclaimed “good news” can lend itself to a theatrical horror show. Eternal torment for gossipers, alcoholics, depressed women, and babies = the worst possible news. Plus, it makes God unthinkably cruel and vindictive, sending demon-thugs after anyone who forgot to say his or her prayers.

Within the last two years, I decided to focus on the problem instead of repressing it. I tried reading the Bible, but that splintered my heart even more; I couldn’t see anything beyond damnation. I put away the Bible, etched my too-heavy questions onto paper, and asked myself over and over how a deity could claim to be love, then doom his own creations—us, who he made imperfect. No answer. Just my honesty, tinted first by anger, then by dejection, then finally by tired acceptance of an era’s end. Very simply, the doctrine of hell burned up every particle of trust I used to have in the goodness of God.

I am sharing this for two reasons: 1) I don’t believe I am the only person to wrestle with the apparent inconsistencies in my religion, especially when the accepted theology is so unfathomably gruesome, and 2) What I took as abandonment these last few years was time. As a result of marinating in my questions for so long, I’ve learned what I’m willing to believe and what I cannot. I’ve let years’ worth of pretenses slide, even writing about my journey some here (which, un-religious honesty about religion? strictly forbidden by the Association of Preachers Who Wear Ties). This has been a very new perspective for me—standing outside Christianity, looking in, wondering why some of those people look so happy—and only now are the answers coming.

A wonderful friend who’s also sludged through this path introduced me to a book called Hope Beyond Hell that said (and I paraphrase):

Ready for a few perspective gymnastics? Good. What you’ve been taught about hell is based on centuries of tradition. In fact, the Bible has buckets and wheelbarrows and industrial-sized cargo boats full of promises that not a single person will be left to burn with Satan forever. Hard to believe, right? Well, take a look…

It wasn’t hard to believe, actually. It was fairy dust, and my translucent wings were instantly unstuck from the swamp; for the first time in years, I’m flying, glad at long last to still be a fairy.

I am not going to list all the reasons or technicalities here—if you’re interested, check out the book—but I am coming to genuinely believe these things:

That this:

God speaks

(besides “reducing holy mysteries to slogans,”* using fear tactics to force people into religion, and just plain being annoying) is misguided.
* Matthew 7:6, The Message. Jesus says not to do it, by the way.

That some parts of the Bible were never meant to be taken literally, and that some parts have been translated poorly due to the translators’ perspective. That many people have formed dogmatic theologies without studying the original words within their original contexts.

That centuries of pulpit-pounders have done untold damage in spreading the idea that God is ready to throw us in a lake of fire when we die.

That God is a better parent than we are and that his kindness endures forever.

That the multitude of different beliefs, different approaches, and different spiritualities in this world will ultimately lead to the same beautiful new beginning.

That we will see all our loved ones again someday.

That there is hope.

26Aug

Bitter/Sweet

Not many people know that I left home at sixteen. It’s one of those facts I tend to keep stuffed in the back of my sock drawer unless it very specifically comes up, and that doesn’t happen often. I can’t help wanting to protect that girl who grew up without anyone to protect her.

That statement would probably confuse anyone who knew my family. We were protected from television, from popularity, from music, from current events, from trendiness, from junk food, from differing religious opinions, from school, from doctors, from other cultures, from puberty, from bad words, from the law. We lived in a double-plated steel bunker of protection. But my heart was left wide open—sometimes even pried apart—to deeper and vastly more sinister dangers than tank tops or measles shots.

I only had an inkling of my own identity, but that turned out to be enough. I snuck out of sermons and found ways to cope. I rose my own money each summer to escape to the Pacific Northwest, Central and South America, Africa. And less than a month after my sixteenth birthday, I left home. No one thought it was a good idea except for me, but I knew. I had to get away to give my heart a fighting chance.

In doing so, I made a surgical cut with iron resolve —no more church or high school friends or employers or family, no going back. And what I struggle with these days is what happened after I made the cut. My friends went on to attend college, marry, have babies, and attend afternoon barbecues together. I’ve contacted several of them lately, thanks to the miracle of Facebook, and they all wave awkwardly from the other side of the chasm wondering, Doesn’t she remember burning this bridge?

Relationships feel odder still with my family, which changed in enormous, unthinkably good ways after I left home. When I visit them—less than once a year since I’ve been married—I hardly recognize them. My siblings are happy and close-knit, every trace of their stress-related illnesses gone. After so many years of feeling guilty that I left them defenseless when I moved out, I am delighted to see them this way. But I am a stranger, by my own choice. They are with their family; I am with mine.

For the first time in my life, I feel pangs of homesickness for the people I walked away from. I chose a life of luggage tags and freedom instead of old friends and permanence, and this is absolutely what I needed. But as most choices in life go, this one has turned out equal parts bitter and sweet.

21Aug

Conservative Hippyism

Dan turned on Audio Adrenaline this afternoon just especially to annoy me as I finished cooking lunch because he loves me so.

Remember this?

I used to like them because even though they were Christian (a requisite for my mid-‘90s music collection), the long-haired bass guitarist used to paint his nails. SUCH A REBEL. Anyway, I hadn’t listened to them in 150 years or so, and some of their lyrics startled me today:
“You can take God out of my school
You can make me listen to you
You can take God out of the pledge
But you can’t take God out of my head.”

I was still brainwashed a good conservative Baptist girl when the issue of prayer in public schools stirred up tremendous controversy in the church. I earnestly believed what I was told: that you would be arrested for having a Bible in your backpack or praying at your desk. Of course that was simple misinformation, spread in hysteria by panicked churchgoers. (If any of you are interested in the actual details of Supreme Court rulings, here ya go.) It never has been and probably never will be illegal to pray in schools; it just isn’t legal to force everyone else to participate. (I am so tempted to go ask the hysterical doomsayers of my childhood how they would have reacted if it had been Muslim prayer or Native American rituals or Wiccan chants being banned… but I guess that is just the heathen in me.)

The subject launched Dan and I into one of those long coffee-fueled conversations that remind us how glad we are to be on the same page. (He calls us “conservative hippies,” a fabulous description for two people feeling out the balance between standards and open mindedness.) We’re coming into that delicate stage of parenting where our preschooler absorbs every word she hears and works it into her own context of the world, and I desperately want to protect her from all the damaging teachings I grew up with. For Dan, who grew up in a different (and more, uh, functional) culture, the challenge is in noticing all the subtle hints of religious dogma that pop up.

For instance, I was reading a new picture book to Natalie today—a gift from relatives who no doubt found the story wholesome. However, I almost threw it away when we got to the page when the spoiled little mice realize how ungrateful they’ve been and start to cry. “I’m so dreadfully ashamed of myself,” sobs the girl mouse, who had refused to eat her parsnips on page 6. Wham. One little sentence packing a life-long punch of obligatory guilt. I know it all too well. (I decided not to make a big deal out of it at the time and finished the story—Natalie has a few years yet before she needs to learn about the religious-cultural doctrine of shame—but that book is never going back on her shelf.)

Dan reminded how much of this idea of making oneself miserable to be moral comes from ancient Jewish culture, and later, Roman Catholicism. (It’s not, by the way, from the Bible. In fact, Paul wrote a lengthy letter directly to the Romans explaining that forgiveness was God’s job, not theirs, and was free, free, free, free, and did he mention free?) It’s incredible to me that shame, a monumentally damaging emotion, is held up as a hallmark of holiness in so many circles.

I’m still unsure how to cultivate the spiritual side of my daughters in a way that will be relevant to them now. I can guarantee I will never be hammering the concept of obedience into their heads as the path to preschool Godliness. (We do teach them to obey us, by the way, just not in the vein of “morality is the point of life, now clean your room.”) Neither will shame or deeply burrowing regret ever be sensations we teach them. We’ll let them read the Bible in time, once they are able to process context and applicability, but there will be no gruesome history lessons for now. (Do you know how many Noah’s Ark-themed gifts I’ve had to throw away? I would like to punch whoever keeps insisting that the story of worldwide homicide and destruction is good for kids just because some animals were involved. And Jesus’s horrific torture, murder, and abandonment by God? They deeply traumatized me as a young child, and I am not willing to put my girls through that at such sensitive ages, no matter how foundational the story is to our faith.)

That only leaves the question of what do we teach them now? I still find myself a bit undone spiritually, decades of righteous BS unraveling while my true un-churchy beliefs begin to form. I feel bad that the girls are not benefitting from a mother who has her own convictions figured out like the mothers of my past all did (or pretended to), but perhaps my honesty in the matter will be enough. Maybe my lack of pretensions can accomplish what severe doctrine failed to do for me: inspire their spirituality to grow and breathe and seek out the truth with confidence.

10Apr

Poll-ar Bear Politics

I miss the following about living in the US:
Early-release movies… in English,
24-hour superstores,
Marshmallows.

I do not miss the following:
SUVs,
Southern accents,
Political commercials.

I can never stop biting my nails during election season in the States. My stomach knots up at every commercial spewing venom about opposing candidates–people, all of them, hoping to do good for our country. Four years ago, two kind men’s faces were pasted all over the media like FBI posters — “Wanted for ignorance and warmongering: George Bush.” “Wanted for spinelessness and baby killing: John Kerry.” It wouldn’t have mattered who won; the influence of each man had already been crippled by hate long before Election Day.

I grew up on the moral battlefield of Texan politics. I dutifully hated Bill Clinton, cheering when he was publicly shamed for his affair. I worked the phone tree for the local Republican headquarters and held signs for hours in the cold on voting days. (The Governor sent me a certificate of thanks for being a “Poll-ar bear.” I’ll wait while you roll your eyes.) I went to meetings where women sporting giant American flag earrings prayed, fervently, for God to strike down the heathens who were demoralizing our country. They were referring, of course, to the Democrats.

Politics came down to three issues for my social circle: abortion, homosexuality, and public education. It didn’t matter that everyone I knew home schooled their children; they were still outraged that public schools taught evolution and “forbade” prayer. It didn’t matter that none of them knew a single gay person; homosexuals deserved no rights. It didn’t matter that none of them had ever been faced with a teenage pregnancy; abortion clinics and doctors should be bombed into oblivion.

I never once heard any of the adults in my life discuss terrorism or poverty or prison reform or medical research. They did mention environmentalism, only to make fun of it; preservation of the earth was just the ploy of immoral Democrats. During “election parties,” when large groups of Christians got together to discuss the takeover of our nation and compare hernias, not a single thought was given to the disadvantaged people in our world. We were too busy hating everyone on the other political team.

I could write entire books on the purposeful ignorance I’ve seen, the arsenic-laced bullshit I’ve heard from people who profess to follow God. I’ve witnessed plenty from non-Christians as well, but the particular brand of fundamentalist warfare I grew up with makes me deeply ashamed. I think Donald Miller puts it perfectly in Searching for God Knows What:

“How did a spirituality such as Christianity, a spirituality that speaks of eternity, of a world without end, of forgiveness of sins and a mysterious union with the Godhead, come to be represented by a moralist agenda and a trickle-down economic theory? And more important, how did a man born of Eastern descent, a man who called Himself the Prince of Peace, a man whom the sacred writings describe eating with prostitutes and providing wine at weddings and healing the sick and ignoring any political plot, a man who wants us to turn the other cheek and give all our possessions if we are sued, become associated with–no, become the poster boy for–a Western moral and financial agenda communicated through the rhetoric of war and ignorant of the damage it is causing to a world living in poverty?”

This isn’t meant to bash the love-less Christians any more than it is to bash people with different sexual orientations or educational philosophies. This is simply to explain why, come November, I will be voting for the presidential candidate I think will best be able to change what truly matters–whether that person be a prehistoric gun-slinging bureaucrat, an inexperienced Muslim pretty-boy, or a fire-breathing she-devil from the bowels of feminist hell.*


*Before you send the hate mail or the flaming bags of poo, make sure you realize that last bit was a joke. If you want to blast me for the “Poll-ar bear” bit, though, I’ll totally understand.

4Apr

The Story

This story starts like a mystery.

A long, green-brown river snakes across Texas. Early Spanish explorers named it “Los Brazos de Dios”–the arms of God–but God’s reach only extends into the Great Plains, forgotten. Along its banks, stubby trees twist out of the clay, staking their claim in the eternal flatness of the Southwest. The river is quiet. Lonely. Uninhabited. Except for them. The 510-acre compound is a dense patch of green in the dusty fields north of Waco. Nestling among the shrubbery are a gristmill, a blacksmith shop, a communal farm. Work horses shuffle wearily in their stables. Small green lizards scurry under rows of sunflowers. Her face is dappled by the early morning light filtering through the church windows. She could have been one of the women in their floor-length dresses with each strand of hair obediently pinned out of sight. She could have been one of the close-cropped men sweating submissively in their long sleeves. But she was just a child, and not just a child but an outsider, cowering under a pew while hundreds of plain-dressed men and women simultaneously screamed in tongues.

This story almost ended a mystery as well. My memories flutter in confetti bits like young children’s often do… Chigger bites at the stained-glass shop. Pecan pie made with some healthy alternative to sugar. Six lanky brothers playing bluegrass on homemade banjoes. A gray-haired grandmother’s pregnant belly. Group songs about a man whose limbs were cut off for praising God. Moonlit rides home after the adults’ hushed meetings. The point is that I remember. When I finally got up the courage to ask about this group, several years ago, I was told I was never there. We both knew it was a lie–the forced shrug, the too-casual change of subject, the thin hope my questions would go away. But some questions can’t be shrugged away. I desperately needed to understand the first fourteen years of my life and why they were kept so far from my grasp. I’ve asked questions, I’ve scoured my memory, I’ve Googled every term I could think of. And finally, today, I found the answers. The group has taken a new name and is under investigation, but nothing has really changed. This part of the story is a history text, the factual treatment of shocking information that you expect to culminate in disaster. 

It started with a group of disillusioned New Yorkers and a mishmash of Pentecostal and Anabaptist beliefs, but mostly with a man. He claimed he was the voice of God. He promised to simplify their lives if only they packed up, moved across the country with him, and promised to pool their future resources for “the church.”Most of his followers enjoy the chance to play Little House on the Prairie in isolation from the secular world. They carve their own furniture and bake their own bread. They plow their fields à la Pa Ingalls and sing together instead of watching television in the evenings. But not all their beliefs are so innocuous. Wedding rings are banned for being a “pagan” custom, as are Christmas trees and makeup. Members are discouraged from visiting doctors, treating sickness instead with herbal remedies and prayer. They do not get Social Security numbers or college degrees, trying so hard to disassociate themselves from the outside world that they even cut off family ties. They are advised to use severe physical punishment on their children, including infants. Any member who disagrees with the leadership’s spiritual “revelations” is publicly humiliated and kicked out of the group. People are free to leave, of course, but they are reigned in by the terrible fear of lost salvation. The leader’s interpretation of theology says that no one’s place in heaven is secure, and his followers live a desperate existence of trying to adequately please God. Children who don’t speak “in tongues” (supposedly a special language that God understands though it sounds like gibberish) are told they aren’t saved. Families are told that their relatives living elsewhere in the world are not true Christians. Women are required to home school their children, men are required to work on the compound, and everyone is required to follow strict dress and conduct codes–all to earn their daily salvation at the word of the leader.

Maybe this story is really a John Grisham thriller and I’m the witness that escaped… names lodged in the recesses of my memory, faces peeking out like magazine scraps. However, I feel much more like a character in a psychological tragedy. Emotions broadside me in quick succession, each hit heavier than the last–shock, repugnance, comprehension, affirmation, pain. I’ve heard of support groups for cult survivors; what about those of us who were never officially part of the cult, but didn’t escape either? This kind of thing is only supposed to happen between book pages, snapped shut on a shelf in quiet disregard… Not in the real stories, the ones that are still being written and rewritten and survived.

28Jan

Focaccia

Pearl Jam is exactly the right music with which to have a religious crisis. You just know that Eddie Vedder is singing from the depths of his own dreadful, gravelly crises and that he would understand if you suddenly shouted a very bad word into the angsty void. (I like Catherine Newman’s use of “focaccia” without the last two syllables.)

I am writing this knowing full-well that it is not socially acceptable to have a religious crisis, at least not in the Christian world. I imagine most other religions are the same way though, too convinced of their own rightness to allow wiggle-room. Admitting weakness to churchgoers inevitably spawns a feeding frenzy, and you haven’t met sharks until you’ve ticked off a Southern Baptist. I know. I used to be a Southern Baptist poster child, a preacher’s kid with curled bangs reaching up to heaven and more righteous indignation than the Bible. Yes, I would very much like to smack my former self too.

I managed to survive the “God loves my parents and thus hates me” crisis when I was thirteen, and then the “God might not exist” crisis prompted by my Christian apologetics class at age fifteen (Feel free to bask a moment in the irony. Are your pores opening yet?), and then the “God doesn’t listen to me,” “God doesn’t talk to me,” and “God is a misogynist” crises in college–all without telling a soul. The idea is to get over your shameful lapse of faith quickly and quietly and then tell everyone your “testimony” of how God brought you through.

If you’ve ever hit a rough patch in your spiritual journey, you know just how much it sucks. You feel like you’ve done something horribly wrong. You feel embarrassed for not having it all together. You feel like a hypocrite for not understanding the system you’re supposed to promote. Most of all, you feel a bottomless, inky-black loneliness. If you can’t talk to God, who’s left?

If I were to name my current state of loneliness, it would be “God exists, but I don’t like him.” What does one do with that, not liking God? Everything triggers it–mealtime prayers, bedtime stories with Natalie, news reports, movies, that sharp doorway that deliberately gets in the way of my elbow. When we eat, I think about all the people starving across the world. How can he say he cares more for humans than for birds? When I hear news about the Middle East, I think about the endless violence and terrorism. How can he say the government is on his shoulders? When I cuddle my precious Sophie, I think about the baby he sent to be tortured, murdered. How can he call this the “good news?” When I read the Bible, I can’t see past the God-sanctioned warmongering, the murdering, the animal-sacrificing, the salt-pillaring, the earth-swallowing, the flooding, the exiling. How can he call himself good?

You have no idea how much I feel like the first un-closeted gay right now. I mean, am I normal? Do any others exist? How do they… uh, do this? Will acceptance possibly outweigh the judgment aimed in my direction? Will anyone be able to help me without just trying to cure my “condition?” Where is the backspace button for my mouth?

It doesn’t matter; I’ve said it. I don’t like God, at least not right now, and hopefully that’s not as scary in his mind as it is in mine. I also hope he’s not offended if I take this opportunity to say exactly what’s on my mind, that being FOCACCIA. (Imagine that being growl-screamed, Eddie Vedder style, please.)

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